I’ve been doing some research into tools that can assist churches in their search engine optimisation activities. I’ve discovered that (not surprisingly) the internet is chock-full of tools for monitoring and analysing SEO, and many of these tools seem to be very similar to each other! Many of them also make massive claims about how high your website will shoot up Google rankings if you use them correctly – and some of them claim to work automatically (just pay your money, and while you sleep, your search engine rankings will climb!) Put simply, there are many tools, and big claims – it can be a little bit overwhelming.
Let’s keep in mind the first (second and third rule of improving search rankings) – quality, relevant content will always serve your readership/membership/potential church visitors well. You might be at the top of the first page in Google rankings, but if your site doesn’t have what people are looking for, it takes two seconds for them to leave.
That said, and assuming you have quality content, there are tools to help you identify keywords, compare your site with similar sites, and more.
I’ve discovered that subscribing to these tools can be quite expensive. For example, to sign-up to use Wordtracker is $59 per month, a PRO account with seomoz starts at $79 per month, and a monthly subscription at SEO Book costs $300. Clearly, if you’re a church or ministry, these costs most likely take these tools out of your league.
Below is a list of free online tools and Firefox add-ons that I’ve discovered in my research – listed in alphabetical order. Most of them I haven’t tried out, but I’ve selected those that seem to be both useful, popular, and (as far as I could tell) well-regarded. My aim is to try them out, to see which tools will be most useful for church and ministry website optimisation. I’ll then return to the list to report back on which tools I’d recommend – if you are currently using tools that you find helpful, why not share them with us below?
Online Tools
Bad Keyword and Number Stripper
“Some keyword sources provide data that is in a format that is hard to use. The goal of this tool is to make it easy to grab a list of keywords from just about any public source, clean it up, and sort it in order of which terms have the greatest potential value.”
“The easy way to improve your websites Search Engine Optimization, Web Technologies and Document Standards whilst also allowing you to monitor your website infrastructure and find out and keep track of what your competitors are doing.”
“Discover the problems search engine robots run into while crawling your website, the http response codes your pages return, cache dates, title tags and more.”
“By examining several factors search engines use to determine location, this tool determines how well a site is targeted to region-specific search engines.”
“Use the Keyword Tool to get new keyword ideas.”
“With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.”
“The Juicy Link Finder returns links that carry authority across different niches.”
“Wondering how difficult it will be to rank for a keyphrase? The Keyword Difficulty tool provides a difficultly rating and an analysis of sites that currently rank well for the query.”
“A tool that allows you to generate a large number of keyword phrases based on permutations of keywords you enter.”
“Linkscape provides never-before-accessed link data on over 43+ billion URLs across 251+ million domains. With this vast array of information you can:
- Identify how many unique domains are linking to a page, subdomain, or to your entire website
- Analyze your competitors to see what they’re doing successfully and how you can emulate their success
- Judge the quality of potential links to your site
- Find specific link acquisition targets
- Measure the success of viral marketing and link bait campaigns”
“Link popularity checker and backlink analysis tool”. Learn more about the data and how it can be used here.
“Updated once daily, this is an aggregation of popular search queries gathered from various sources across the web.”
“Rank Tracker retrieves search engine rankings for pages and keywords and stores them for easy comparison later. This tool supports the Google, Yahoo!, and Live search engines and additionally allows you to check international results.”
“Powerful management tool to provide valuble info about rankings in any major search engine to it’s users. Keep track of your competitors, linkup with your Google Analytics profile and find out which of your keywords are really worth optimizing.”
“A collection of free SEO tools.”
“This tool analyzes the content of a given page and extracts the terms that appear to be targeted at search engines. It applies certain weights to HTML elements and other on-page factors to determine what it thinks is a targeted term.”
“Measure the strength of pages, blogs and entire domains based on factors inherent to popularity, influence and ranking ability and see your impact compared against others in your industry.”
“Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.”
Firefox Add-ons
“Check mozRank, mozTrust and other Linkscape metrics in your browser get quick and easy access to all the SEOmoz tools and other PRO resources.”
“SEO Profesional Toolbar offers many SEO-related tools in one place. Display PageRank, S-Rank and the number of backlinks for visited pages. Stores the history of ranks for selected sites. Highlight words, links, view number of words and more.”
“Provides quick access to some web-based tools to help with search engine optimization. Quickly check inbound links, PageRank, http headers, and much more. Right-click on an open area of a web page, or use the included toolbar.”
“RankQuest SEO Toolbar provides you quick access to more than 30 intuitive SEO tools. Alexa Rank and Page Rank provided by Alexa and Google respectively ensures the popularity of the site.”
“SEO Quake is aimed primarily at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization and internet promotion of web sites. Seoquake allows to obtain and investigate many important SEO parameters of the internet.”
“Foxy SEO Tool offers tools for search engine optimization (SEO), web traffic and page analysis for webmasters and web professionals.”
